


Gumption

by avantegarda



Series: It's the New World, Darling-A 19th-20th Century AU [12]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Victorian, F/M, Gen, beren is such a hillbilly honestly, i say victorian but this is actually set in louisiana, lulu uses a ton of italics because she is a Southern Belle, luthien is actually growing on me, tomato tomahto, what is this feeling so sudden and new
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-04-11
Packaged: 2020-01-11 19:54:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18430988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avantegarda/pseuds/avantegarda
Summary: Luthien duBois isn't letting anything come between her and her man.





	Gumption

**Author's Note:**

> This story is directly connected to my other one about these idiots, "Scandal of the Century."  
> I don't know how Thingol got elected governor of Louisiana but I'm guessing he promised everyone jewelry and alcohol.

_ Baton Rouge, Louisiana _

_ 1899 _

 

I met my future husband at a party, of course. Isn’t that always the way?

As a matter of fact, it was  _ my  _ party—my twenty-third birthday. “Another year into spinsterhood!” I joked, much to Mama and Papa’s disapproval. Truth be told, I most likely could have been married earlier, were it not for my pickiness and Papa’s tendency to chase off any of my gentleman callers. “I won’t be handing off my most precious treasure to anyone incapable of protecting it,” Papa always used to say. Personally I wasn’t sure I particularly liked that phrasing, but what could I do about it?

The party, though.  _ That  _ was something.

My birthday was in March, so the weather in Louisiana was still mild and pleasant, far from the unbearable humidity of summer. As a result, we’d decided to have the soirée outside, and the garden of the governor’s mansion had been set up in grand style: paper lanterns Mama’s family had sent her from China strung up in the trees, bottles of the finest French champagne, and a ten-piece band brought up from New Orleans. My friends from finishing school were all to be there, as well as plenty of Papa’s associates from business and politics, and, of course, Daeron deSilva.

It wasn’t as though I didn’t  _ like  _ Daeron. He was perfectly sweet and played the piano beautifully (not to mention, as Papa frequently reminded me, his family owned half the rubber plantations in Brazil). And we’d been quite good friends as children. But it became pretty plain, as we grew up, that he was after me to marry him, and despite how much my parents would have supported the match I simply couldn’t bring myself to agree.

So at the party, when Daeron began tailing after me as usual, I did what any polite young lady would do: I danced with him three times and fled before he could start quoting Shakespeare at me again. I don’t  _ like  _ to be compared to a summer’s day, honestly. Summer’s days here are hot and sticky and exhausting, and you’d think Daeron would have  _ realized  _ this.

Leaving all terrible metaphors behind, I made my way to the back vegetable garden, which had thankfully not been lit up for the party. Kicking off my shoes, I took a deep breath of fresh night air and began practicing a few steps I’d learned at Madame Lavarre’s ballet academy. I’d studied there for ten years as a youngster, and Madame Lavarre said I could have been a professional, but Papa disapproved, naturally. Governor’s daughters didn’t join ballet companies.

“Miss!  _ Miss! _ ”

I just about jumped out of my skin, but turned around as gracefully as I could manage. I was surprised to see, hurrying towards me, a young man in a shabby suit holding a pale pink fan.

“You...you dropped this,” he stammered, holding the fan out to me. “I thought...well, I reckoned you wouldn’t want to lose it.”

“Oh, gosh, my fan!” I exclaimed, taking it from him. “Thank you ever so much, Mama would be furious if I lost it. She brought it all the way from China with her, you know. You’re terribly sweet.”

He blushed fiercely, his olive skin turning a dark raspberry. “Well, I’m just sorry to have disturbed you, miss. You’re...you’re a very good dancer.”

“How sweet of you to say so. I don’t think we’ve met, Mister…?”

“Ah, Bergman,” he said, with an awkward half-bow. “Beren Bergman. Mr. duBois was kind enough to hire me as security for the evening. Making sure folks don’t steal the family silver, all that.”

Now I remembered. I had seen him lined up outside with the other men that Papa always hired at big events, being shouted at by Mr. Deschamps, our head of security. He was, I was surprised to see, quite sweet-looking up close. A bit shorter than me (though I’d always been embarrassingly tall for a girl) with dark brown curls and wide shoulders. Quite a serious face, though. I wondered if I could make him smile.

“Well, Mr. Bergman, I am Luthien duBois,” I said brightly, holding out my hand, which he shook firmly. “My friends call me Lulu. And considering how chivalrous you’ve been, I  _ do  _ hope we will be friends.”

Beren did smile then. Just as I suspected: adorable.

 

I convinced Papa to keep Beren around for some time, as a handyman/security guard/gardener. The poor fellow needed work, after all, and Papa was hardly short of cash. Not to mention that it gave me an opportunity to get to know him better. When Papa was away at work and Mama was off shopping or micromanaging the staff, I would sneak over to wherever Beren was working with a pitcher of sweet tea and force him to chat with me. I say “force” since the poor boy was terribly shy and bashful (at least around me) and needed quite a bit of prompting to say anything about his own life. I did eventually manage to discover that he hailed from West Virginia, he’d lost his family as a young boy, and he’d spent the last several years living an unfortunately nomadic lifestyle.

“I reckon it was worth it in the end, though,” Beren told me, with one of his rare smiles. “After all, I wound up here, didn’t I?”

Honestly, it was things like that that made me know he was the man for me. Maybe I was being too quick and impulsive again, but I am a  _ very  _ decisive woman, and I fell hard for that poor sweet boy. So when he asked me to marry him a month later, I said yes before he even finished asking the question.

Was I  _ so  _ foolish for thinking my parents wouldn’t mind terribly? After all, Mama and Papa hadn’t exactly had a conventional marriage, what with Papa being an American businessman and Mama being a Chinese opera singer. They, too, had fallen in love right away and all but eloped. So I thought their reaction to my engagement was a bit rich, really. Papa lost his temper and told me there was no way he would allow me to marry someone so far beneath us, and even Mama said I was too young and we hadn’t known each other long enough. There was screaming, there were tears, there were broken things, and eventually Papa came up with the most idiotic plan I’d ever heard: If Beren was able to steal an astoundingly valuable diamond from a famous criminal,  _ then  _ we could get married.

I was all for ignoring him and eloping, honestly. But Beren was just too darned honorable (not to mention stubborn) to turn down the deal. “Wouldn’t it be better if we got hitched with your father’s blessing, Lulu?” he asked. “You love your family, you’d hate to be cut off from them.”

“That’s as may be, but it’s a stupid quest! This gangster fellow, this Morgoth, isn’t he supposed to have hideouts all over the country? Where will you even get started? ”

“I have some ideas for that, actually. My pa, before he died, was pretty good friends with a fellow by the name of Finrod Gates—he’s the mayor of Nargothrond, you know, out in California. British, but a good man. He might know what my next step is, since half his cousins are criminals themselves.”

“I don’t like this,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s horrible, this whole blessed  _ thing  _ is horrible. You could die, or end up in prison! Why are you  _ doing  _ this?”

And of course, he had to give me those puppy-dog eyes and say, “Because I love you, darlin’.”

Men, I swear.

 

As if everything else going on wasn’t bad enough, the minute Beren left for California my father put me under house arrest.

He said it was “for my own safety,” but it was pretty plain the actual reason was that he thought I would run off to California after Beren the first chance I got. Granted, he was absolutely right—I would have bolted at the first opportunity—but it was absolutely humiliating, to be locked up in my room like a naughty little girl. And as the days went by and we still received no word at all, my situation became unbearable. But it was a conversation I overheard between my parents two weeks in that I realized it was time for action. There was a conveniently placed air vent in my room that led directly down to the parlor, and one afternoon as I lay listlessly in bed I could hear Mama and Papa’s voices floating up through it.

“Hasn’t this gone on long enough, Thingol? She’s just a young girl, you can’t punish her for falling in love. We weren’t so different, back in our day.”

“I am not punishing her, Melian. I am protecting her. You know how impulsive that girl is, if I let her have an inch of freedom she’ll be out of the house like a shot and go chasing after that lousy hillbilly. Far better to have her safe at home without distractions until this whole infatuation blows over.”

_ Infatuation?  _ I wanted to holler down the vent.  _ You’re one to talk about infatuation, you old fool!  _ Fortunately, I managed to keep my mouth shut.

“So you expect her to fall out of love just as easily as she fell in it?”

“I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. Probably for the best if she does, I can’t see much chance of that boy actually succeeding. I hear he’s up in San Francisco now with that British friend of his, and that city’s so full of Morgoth’s thugs he’ll be lucky if he lasts another week.”

Mama said something, but I had stopped listening. I’d never been this furious in my  _ life.  _ Papa thought I was just an impulsive child? Well then, I’d  _ be  _ an impulsive child. I’d be out of this house like a shot, just as he said, and he’d never even have to  _ see  _ me again. Mama would be sad, and I was sorry for that, but if she was going to go along with Papa’s silly house-arrest plan she couldn’t expect me to side with her. 

The first part of my escape scheme was simple. It would be much easier for me to sneak out of the city if I didn’t look like a wealthy unchaperoned girl, so I bribed my maid into finding me some secondhand boys’ clothes. She brought back a patched corduroy jacket, blue canvas overalls of the type industrial workers wore, a straw hat, and a pair of heavy steel-toed boots. As I was tall and skinny and had big feet, everything fit fairly well...though there was the troubling matter of my hair, which was long enough to sit on and thus ruined the entire disguise. In my entire twenty-three years of life, Mama had never once let me cut it: she called it my “crowning glory” and insisted on brushing it herself every night before I went to bed, one hundred strokes every time. It was a silly thing, but the thought of cutting off my hair to run away from home made me tear up a bit, like I was burning my last bridge with my family. As I picked up my scissors, my hand was trembling so much I almost dropped them.

_ Just do it, Lulu, _ I told myself firmly.  _ Hair grows back, and Beren’s going to love you no matter what you look like. _

A minute later, there was a good three feet of hair lying on the floor, and I was fairly certain that—if I rubbed some dirt on my face and no one looked at me too closely—I could pass for a boy.

The second part of the plan, getting out of the house, would be more difficult. My bedroom door was locked from the outside, so sneaking out that way wouldn’t work. The only other option was the window, which Papa had originally threatened to put bars on, but he must have decided that I wasn’t foolish enough to risk breaking my neck by climbing down a three-story wall.

Papa always underestimates what I am foolish enough to do. 

I won’t say it wasn’t absolutely terrifying sneaking down the side of the house on the makeshift rope I’d made out of bedsheets and the hair I’d cut off (waste not want not), because it  _ was _ , especially when I had to pass by a window. But luckily enough, I made it to the ground unscathed, and it felt like child’s play hopping the garden fence and cutting across the neighbors yards to the street.

It was a beautiful night, cool and crisp, with the faint scent of magnolia blossoms on the breeze, and despite everything I’d just done and all the danger I knew I was about to face, I felt I could do anything, anything at all. I was going to  _ win. _

“You hold on, honey,” I whispered into the dark, hoping against hope that somehow Beren would hear me. “I’m coming for you.”


End file.
